The Fury Out of Time (9 page)

“What makes it worse is that I was thinking of making the trip myself. I’m sure something could have been designed to protect the passenger.”

“What were you going to protect the passenger against? Time? Well, you can have a shot at designing a protective device that would keep out time!”

“Not time. Pressure. The pressure built up in passing through time. Never mind. There’s no use arguing about it now.”

“What sort of a device did you have in mind?”

“Something along the line of deep-sea diving equipment.”

“Yes,” Haskins mused. “That might have worked. The passenger was crushed, which certainly suggests that he was subjected to a purely physical pressure. Mention the possibility in your report The scientists have been taking your assumption seriously since they saw the U.O. vanish. Smoke bothering you? Here, I’ll open a window. We did chalk up one significant gain. We now have a practical nuclear fuel. It’s a simple liquid allotrope of uranium, and we can produce it in quantity as soon as we find a use for it. But you only answered part of my question. What were
you
trying to do?”

“I’m not sure. I thought that three of the instrument capsules selected the U.O.’s destination—in time—and if they were precisely reversed the U.O. could be sent back to where it came from. It’s just possible that those responsible for it aren’t aware of the destruction it causes. Returning it to them would be one way of bringing that to their attention.”

“Where were those three capsules set when Ostrander pulled the switch?”

“He had them set where I wanted them, and if he left them there— Was there enough fuel in the U.O. to get it back where it came from?”

Haskins nodded. “The fuel container was nearly three-fourths full when it arrived, and we took only a small sample for analysis. Here’s Whistler. You two are leaving today on a long vacation. We’ll go over the whole business when you get back.”

“Don’t be silly. I’m in the Air Force, thanks to you. I go where I’m told. And Whistler is in bondage to his cash register.”

“You belong to me, and I’m telling you to take a vacation. Go collect butterflies or something. Take a month. Take two months, if you want them. You’ll be incapacitated at least that long. Whistler will drive the car and run errands for you.”

“Who’ll run the tavern?” Karvel asked Whistler.

“It don’t need no running,” Whistler said cheerfully. “What d’ya think I got the new bartender for? Ma takes off whenever she feels like it to visit her sisters, but I ain’t had a real vacation in years.”

“That explains your nasty disposition,” Karvel said. “All right, we’ll go together. But not to collect butterflies. If even a one-wing butterfly was to light in my lap, I’d shoo it away.”

They left that afternoon. Karvel took an imaginary compass reading on Lieutenant Ostrander’s laughing face, and chose a route that seemed to lead in the opposite direction. Whistler’s driving technique was a hair-raising blend of insolence and impetuosity, and they would have made excellent time had he not insisted on a professional visit to every bar that crossed his line of sight. They spent more time in bars than they did traveling, and before the end of the first afternoon Karvel made a startling discovery. Whistler never drank anything stronger than beer, and he drank very little of that.

“I got too much respect for my insides,” he said.

“I wish you had some respect for mine. How much lousy whiskey have you sold me in the last six months?”

“Why should I sell you good whiskey? Guys that drink like you taste with their stomachs.”

By the time they reached Kansas City, Karvel had convinced himself that Colonel Vukin was right. It was too soon for crutches, and Whistler handled the wheel chair as if it contained a load of nitroglycerin. He gave Karvel a luxuriously comfortable ride, maneuvering around bumps, easing the chair over curbs, coming to a dead stop at corners. Karvel would have preferred more speed with the chair and less with the car, but he suffered in silence.

Another imaginary compass reading, and they turned south into Oklahoma and then Texas, with Ostrander’s face behind them and Karvel’s personal range of mountains filling the horizon.

“If you aren’t going to drink, why are we spending all this time in bars?” Karvel asked impatiently.

“I like to watch bartenders work. I been studying them all my life, everywhere I go. The good ones, they got a philosophy, and no two of ‘em work just alike.”

“There can’t be that many ways to pour a glass of beer.”

“You’re thinking about the mechanics. The philosophy is how you treat your customers. Look at this guy. He flatters everybody. Me, I give ‘em insults. It don’t matter as long as it’s genuine. Even a drunk customer can see through a phoney philosophy.”

“This comes as a shock. I’ve never thought of you as a philosopher.”

“That’s ‘cause I’m so good at it,” Whistler said.

They drove west across New Mexico and into Arizona, and finally rented space in a trailer camp in Tucson. For a week Whistler visited bars, and Karvel soaked up sunshine and asked himself what he could have done to keep Ostrander from trying one more switch, and both of them became so bored that they stopped insulting each other. Then, late one night, Gerald Haskins came knocking at their trailer door.

He handed Karvel his briefcase as casually as though they had parted two minutes before. “Hold the door,” he said, and was back a moment later with a motion picture projector and a screen.

“Goody!” Whistler said. “Movies.”

“We have another U.O.,” Haskins said.

“Ostrander?” Karvel asked quickly.

Haskins shook his head. “Set up the screen, will you, Bert?”

“No trace at all of Ostrander?”

“Another
U.O., I said. It wiped out a little village in northeast France, which means that it belongs to the French. It was only through a stroke of luck that we even found out about it.”

“Was there a passenger?”

“Yes. Just as smashed as the last one. The French have agreed to exchange information with us. Colonel Stubbins is already in France, and some of my men went over with him. I had business to wind up on the West Coast, so I had the first reports flown to me there. I thought I might as well get your reaction on my way east.”

“You’re going to France?”

“Tomorrow. Ready, Bert? Where can I plug this thing in?”

Haskins threaded in the film and adjusted the focus, and they were looking down into a valley at the demolished village. Rubble clogged the streets except for a lane that a bulldozer had carved out. Three tents stood in the foreground, and the wooded hills across the valley were scarred with the widening loops of the spiral.

“How many people were killed?” Karvel asked.

“They think seventy-three. The entire village. As you can see, it was built on a curve. At that point Force X was just wide enough to take all of it. The only survivor was the priest, who happened not to be home.”

The camera moved closer. They could watch workmen shifting stones and moving rafters and shoveling rubble. A young priest stepped carefully amidst the debris, head bowed, hands clasped behind his back—a pathetic, lonely figure who had no soul left to attend to but his own. The dust had scarcely settled about the village, but it was as lifeless as Nineveh because its people had died with it.

“What’s the name of the place?” Whistler asked.

“St. Pierre something or other. Just a moment. Here it is—St.-Pierre-du-Bois.”

“Never heard of it.”

“It’s less well-known than Paris,” Haskins said dryly.

“You said northeast France. I been all through there. I was stationed there more than a year, during the war. I don’t remember no St.-Pierre-du-Bois.”

“You wouldn’t,” Karvel said. “It was too small to have a bar.”

Haskins stopped the projector. “The rest is a close-up of the U.O.,” he said. He reversed the film to a shot of the entire valley, and dipped into his briefcase. “A farmer named Cras was walking on the road north of the village when Force X struck him. Before he died he made a statement. I want you to read it.”

It consisted of a single paragraph. Cras had been hurrying home to supper. There was still enough light to see the village clearly, but he hadn’t been looking at it directly. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the church steeple fall. He stopped and stared, and the village wasn’t there. A moment before it had been, but now there wasn’t a single house standing. Just rubble piled up and flung about, and a cloud of dust rising over everything. He started to run, and then something struck him, and that was all he remembered.

“Any comment?” Haskins asked.

Karvel shook his head.

“Getting hit by Force X is the one thing you’re expert in. Compare the Frenchman’s experience with yours, and see how many new assumptions you can come up with.”

Karvel pushed himself to his feet and hobbled to the screen. “Cras must have been closer to the center of the spiral than I was. Are we facing north? Then he was somewhere along this road. Where was the U.O. found?”

“Where the large tent is,” Haskins said. “They haven’t moved it yet.”

“Here’s the loop that took the village, and on the next time around it took this tree by the road—he couldn’t have been
that
close—and then it got the trees south of the village. Cras must have been about here, which means that Force X approached him across open fields. He had no warning at all. Just a moment.”

“What’s the matter?”

“The spiral goes clockwise. The spiral that struck me was moving counterclockwise.”

“Are you sure? Yes, I see it now. That’s very interesting. I’ll have something to say to my men for having missed that. Can you think of anything else?”

Karvel shook his head.

Haskins turned off the projector and got out a cigar. “There are several interesting things about this U.O.
_-2
. For one, it arrived with its fuel tank, if that’s the proper term for it, virtually empty. This naturally raises the question as to whether the stuff we analyzed really is fuel. We’ve sent a batch to the French for experimental purposes, but we can’t be positive yet that this is what makes a U.O. go.”

“Their first experiment is likely to be their last one,” Karvel said.

“They’ve been warned. For another thing, the passenger is absolutely unearthly. There is no possibility of it being related to any known Earth species. The French consider this proof positive that the U.O. comes from outer space.”

“Are you certain that it’s a different U.O.?”

Haskins nodded. “We took shavings for metallurgical analysis, which left marks. This U.O. doesn’t have any.”

“Did they look for butterflies?”

Haskins caught his breath. “I don’t think so, but I’ll see that they do. Can you fit this unearthly passenger into your time theory?”

“Easily. We’ll soon have contact with other worlds. Eventually there’ll be contact with inhabited worlds, and those inhabitants will probably visit Earth. I see nothing strange in the idea of an unearthly being visiting us from the future.”

Haskins bit firmly on his cigar, and emitted a series of short puffs. “Pressure,” he whispered, as though the word awed him. “Tremendous pressure. Do you have any idea how much pressure that U.O. is built to resist, inside and out? Neither do we, and we probably wouldn’t believe it if we knew. It isn’t spherical by accident, and it’s made of a strange alloy that is soft, but becomes hard under pressure. The more pressure, the harder it gets. For all we know, from the tests we’ve been able to make, that condition maintains to infinity. That soft metal—under pressure—is the hardest substance known to man.”

“The instruments are designed—we think—so that pressure won’t damage them or change their settings. Under pressure they lock in place. The engineers who designed the U.O. knew that there’d be killing pressure, both inside and outside, but they made no attempt to protect the passenger. Why?”

“We
knew that there’d be killing pressure, but we made no attempt to protect the passenger we sent back to them.”

Haskins gaped at him. “You mean—stowaways?
Both
of them? No.” He shook his head. “No. One I could accept, but not two. This can’t go on, you know. Twenty-eight people were killed by U.O.
_-1
, and another sixty were injured seriously. Seventy-three were killed by U.O.
_-2
. We were lucky both times. We may not be so lucky with U.O.-3.”

“What are the chances of my taking a ride in U.O.
_-2
?” Karvel asked.

“None,” Haskins said bluntly. “The French have been highly cooperative in exchanging information, but that’s to their advantage as well as ours. They won’t be receptive to suggestions as to what they should do with the U.O. I personally think that their investigation is a mess, with nothing being done right, but that’s their privilege. We had our chance, and we blew it. Any passenger in this one would be French.”

“That’s what I was afraid of.”

“It’s too bad, really. If you weren’t so banged up, I’d say it was an ideal job for you. No one has better qualifications, and you have no family at all, which is important. Even if you made the trip safely, you couldn’t come back. Do you know that?”